You state it like the government granted us the right to "keep and bear arms". That is now how the Bill of Rights work. The point is to restrain the government from infringing on rights we already have. In the US, our rights don't come from government.

I think the logic they are using is that gun manufacturers similar to "big tobacco". The idea is that "big gun" is tricking people into buying guns. 3D printed guns will take revenue away from "big gun". The thing is that there has been a long tradition of making and customizing firearms. People have made a business of tricking out guns (trigger jobs, patterns, etc).

Making a gun at home has been fairly easy without a 3D printer and the results are MUCH better than a printer can produce. Will metal sintering become cheap enough and good enough to make a gun that is as good what Armalite or a Winchester can do? We'll see. By that time gun manufactures won't be the only ones impacted. The revolution would be way bigger than just guns.

Mechanical things require precision and durability. People have been building guns at home for many, many years, but it does take time and know-how. It is much easier just to buy a high quality build from a well known manufacturer. Even if one builds most of the firearm at home, it is still better to buy the barrel because it is important to get that part right.

Why not build a car at home? Why not build your own house? Both of those things can be done, but it is just easier to buy those things from someone that is good at doing it.

Numbers please. NRA membership is somewhere between 3 to 5 million members (based on tax returns). Now compare to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Many are smaller manufacturers.

I've heard the point that manufacturers also donate the the NRA, but I don't see how that outweighs the number of individual members.

Similar point to NRA donations to candidates. The NRA's financial support is dwarfed by other PACs in total numbers.

Yes, of course. That is because it is illegal to manufacture fully auto weapons for civilians. Just because we have the right to build a firearm, it doesn't mean we can get around existing laws. That means that in California I can't make an AR-15 with a pistol grip, if I do, the magazine must be "fixed" to the receiver.

There has been a long tradition of making firearms in the US. A friend of mine is a machinist and he was telling me that it is like a right of passage for a machinist to make a simple firearm.

Why would you assume that the NRA is a manufacturing PAC? The power of the NRA is people and lots of them.

Yes, the government has already covered manufacturing. As long as one is able to legally own a firearm, one is able to build one for PERSONAL use. The firearm they build cannot be sold or given to anyone. If someone builds a firearm to sell, then they fall into the manufacturing category and must be licensed as a manufacturer.

But why ask permission to build a weapon? Are US citizens not free people? Why would we have to ask permission to protect ourselves? We don't live in medieval Europe, we live in the USA.

Actually......

Back in the days when Yahoo! was the biggest thing on the Internet, there was an article talking about how Yahoo! was only paying for around half of the cost of their total bandwidth usage. How? Instead of sending all of their data over transit, around half of their data went over links directly connected to large ISPs (peering links). At the time, transit was common. Only large telecom (backbone) providers were well peered across the nation. More and more content providers started doing this. For example, AOL bought a national network from IBM so they could do the same thing. Peering. Peering was the thing that saved the Internet. Robert Metcalfe's famous prediction that the Internet would collapse due to all the traffic on the backbone networks didn't happen because of the growing popularity of peering.

A lot has changed since then. Peering very common and the business of peering has changed. A important part of a CDN is peering. Peering went from something that is a win-win for a content provider-ISP to a service a last mile can charge for (last mile networks are valuable). Note the fee for peering is still cheaper than transit. That is what makes it attractive to companies like Netflix. I can't imaging what Netflix's bandwidth bill would be if they were ONLY using transit. Peering saves them a TON of money.

The reason Net Neutrality is brought up in the context of peering is that NN first started as a discussion of traffic shaping/filtering/blocking. Then the Netflix issue with their CDN (Cogent) hit the news and everyone seemed to treat it as a NN issue. It wasn't a NN issue, it was a peering issue. My fear is that NN would encompass peering. When all this was going down the FCC make a statement that they were watching the Netflix situation, but didn't consider peering part of NN. Unfortunately, some people disagreed (IMHO, mainly due to ignorance). If peering were to be part of NN, then, yeah, large content providers (e.g. Netflix, Google) could demand cut rate deals on peering. Or, like the initial post argues, "free bandwidth", which has NOTHING to do with the ORIGINAL intent of NN.

It used to be that you could dialup whatever ISP you wanted. If you didn't like them, cancel them, dial up another. It was great, but the old copper just can't handle high speed.

At the local level, cities need to allow more competition. The current, local, regulation doesn't cultivate competition for last mile services. There is not much the FCC can do about that.

The old model of granting a single cable company to provide service in a city just doesn't hold up. The what is the solution? Pulling coax/fiber costs money (just ask Google). The grant of exclusivity made sure the company would make their investment back. Maybe a model would be that a city would grant exclusivity to two or more infrastructure companies. The infrastructure companies only sell their services to ISP's. The ISP's can use the infrastructure company that works best for them and customer can choose the ISP that they like. This would be closer to what happened in the days of dialup.

I remember the days when I saw that handle all the time on /.org. Thank you Roblimo!

Oddly enough, I don't recall seeing a picture of him until now.

The Netflix issue was not a Net Neutrality issue. The FCC *before* Pai stated this.

Netflix had peering issues because the company they hired to handle their delivery network didn't have an incentive to upgrade their ports. The provider had settlement free peering before they took on Netflix as a customer. Once Netflix took a more direct approach to managing their peering the problem was solved.

I seem to recall an announcement by Sprint a couple of years ago where they sold off their towers and now lease them from a tower company. Only problem with American Tower is that they are HUGE player and therefore mainly like dealing with other large players. Ham radio people don't seem to like dealing with them.

If you don't mind the -20F cold in Winter, move to Bemidji, MN. I have family near Blackduck, MN and all the farms are wired with fiber by the telephone co-op ( http://www.paulbunyan.net/ ). They offer a 1Gb/s (up/down) tier.

Exactly. I don't understand why people can't see the difference. The reason we have such little competition at the local level is *because* local government limited it. There might be good reasons for it, but local government need to make it easier for companies to run wire. Look at the Google Fiber example, such bureaucracy with local government, and they gave up.

The other big difference is with a co-ops, people actually have work together on the project. Government? "Just give it to me!"

At the same time Irma was happening, the Earth was getting hit by a solar flare. It was the "perfect storm" in that we were experiencing a terrestrial storm and a solar flare at the same time. The solar flare impacts HF radio ( 30Mhz), GPS accuracy and satellite phones. VHF can still be useful, but long distance HF skip is iffy. Hams have some nice digital modes that can burst data. I would still rather have access to ham radios in a situation like that over sat phones. Search TamithaSkov on youtube for space weather reports and how the sun impacts radio.